As a young professor, Henry had eagerly preached the science of history to a rising generation of green Harvard scholars. In later years, however, he seemed to think that he had done his young a great disservice, playing the role of a modern Socrates. In 1901 he wrote to Henry Osborn Taylor, a former student, complaining of “my dreary Anglo-Saxon Law which was a tour-de-force possible only to youth. Never did any man go blind on a career more virtuously than I did, when I threw myself so obediently into the arms of the Anglo-Saxons in history, and the Germans in art.”1 Growing older, Adams came to regard his inherited Boston worldview as witlessly positivistic, capitalistic, and imperialistic. It reflexively worshiped science and technology, making the heartless dynamo the center of contemporary civilization. Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law, Henry now sheepishly acknowledged, had uncritically stressed the prevailing centuries-long march toward democracy by the German Volk and their Anglo offshoots—a neat pattern of historical progress he no longer believed. The opportunity to raise a heretical voice presented itself in response to a professional honor he had tried desperately to avoid.
At their July 1893 meeting in Chicago, members of the American Historical Association voted Adams president of the organization. His ties to the AHA were largely social and superficial, and he struggled in its early days to remember even its name, referring to it variously in correspondence as the “National Society of History,” the “History Congress,” and the “Historical Congress.” He had attended a few of its earlier gatherings—“Our sessions were long, mostly dull, and often ludicrous”—but had missed the past several.2 Travel in Europe and the South Seas offered ready excuses for his repeated absences, but Henry, fully into the chilly freedom of a posthumous life, had moved beyond professional societies and their professional prizes. This did not stop the AHA from electing him vice president in 1890 (while he obliviously sunned and Siva-ed in Samoa) and reelecting him in 1891 and 1892. Now, as presiding officer, he was expected to actually stand before his fellow scholars and deliver a presidential address; thus ensued a delicate cat-and-mouse game between a reticent Henry and the man poised to lead him to the podium, AHA secretary and Johns Hopkins historian Herbert Baxter Adams.
The spirit of renunciation had long been a prominent feature in Henry’s emotional equipment. Had the Association’s secretary understood this—or simply have conferred with Harvard president Charles William Eliot on the unusual difficulties of insisting an honor on Henry Adams—he would have saved himself a great deal of frustration. The year prior to Henry’s receiving the AHA’s presidency, Harvard had attempted to award the author of the History an honorary degree; naturally he would be expected to participate in the commencement exercise. Considering his distaste for such occasions, along with an aversion to nepotism—Charles and John sat, respectively, on the University’s Board of Overseers and the Harvard Corporation—it is unsurprising that Henry resisted the overture. He stated in a long lecture-letter to President Eliot that the recognition tacitly presumed the honoree “to be the first in his profession,” a notion he absolutely resisted. Rather, he artfully swore, the ten-volume Lincoln: A History (1890) written by John Nicolay and Hay, personal secretaries to the sixteenth president during the Civil War, exceeded in every respect his own modest History: “Nothing that I have ever done, or ever shall do, will hold its own beside portions of the Lincoln.… I could not without positive shame put myself in a position where I should seem to countenance the idea that any work of mine compared in importance either of purpose, of moral value, or of public interest to the singularly noble and American character of this monument to the greatest man of our time.”3
Not to be put off, Eliot politely pressed his case, noting that Harvard wished to recognize Henry’s good scholarship and teaching, which had “greatly enlarged and improved,” so he insisted, historical training at the school. He further observed that the Lincoln constituted a contemporary study, “literary,” he called it, as opposed to historical. And in any case, he reminded Adams, “the question of the propriety of this degree may better be settled by the judgment of your elders and contemporaries than by your own. You are not conferring this degree on yourself—it is the act of the University. To decline it would require a thousand explanations—to accept it is natural and modest.” Sensing himself boxed in (“Your very kind letter of the 14th leaves little opening for a reply”), Henry proceeded to reply—twice. In the first communication, labeled “Private,” he declared himself too young for such a recognition—“Wait till I am sixty”—and noted further and with some embarrassment that those wishing the degree upon him were “old friends, relations or connections” at the university.4 Again he declined. In the second “official” note, he expressed regret that a sudden health crisis—a sprained ankle—precluded his appearance at the commencement.
Had his presence been pardoned there is reason to believe that he may have accepted Harvard’s dollops in absentia. Only two weeks after spurning Eliot, Henry consented to receive the degree honoris causa from Western Reserve University in Cleveland, on condition that he be excused from attending the ceremony. Yes, the Harvard invitation may have bothered him because it bore the fingerprints of so many friends and family, though his connections to Western Reserve were only slightly less conspicuous. John Hay sat on its board of trustees while Adams’s former student Charles Thwing served as its president. Attendance appears to have been the sticking point. In a wonderfully cryptic letter to Thwing (“My dear Scholar”), Henry replied that Western Reserve’s lack of conditions for the award were agreeable: “For that, I am in no way responsible, and can accept it without rousing internal questions of any ignorance or error. For that, I feel no self-reproach.”5
The AHA honor, by contrast, presumed a present and address-giving Adams to perform before the historians. A few months after the Association election Henry tried to beg off, telling Herbert Baxter Adams that while “the compliment [was] flattering” he would, due to travel plans, be unable to attend the September 1894 meeting in Saratoga, New York. Perhaps troweling it on a little thick, he told the secretary that he expected “to be absent from the United States during the next twelvemonth.” Henry did spend part of the late summer of 1894 with Hay and a group of geologists tracing the Yellowstone River’s headwaters. There, he fished, tracked “big elk” and bear, and fought off swarms of mosquitoes. Riding for several weeks over hundreds of miles, he thought the Teton Mountains “really fine,” enjoyed, so he told Lizzie Cameron, a “delicious” early morning “bath of hot geyser-water” compliments of Old Faithful, and seemed to think the “empty” landscape sympathetic to the parameters of a posthumous existence: “I rather like this rambling all alone, from day to day, with no purpose, no reason, and no thoughts!… It is a queer Nirvana, but it seems to work.”6
Attentive to courtesies, Henry had sent his presidential address to Herbert Baxter Adams before leaving for the West, assuming the matter laid to rest. How wrong he was. The industrious secretary, now referred to by Henry in his correspondence as “my bête-noire,” had postponed the meeting till late December and relocated it to Washington—Henry’s backyard. “Really,” Henry complained to Hay, “he has put me in a tight place.” Searching for a suitable pretext to avoid the gathering, he tried without success to corral King into joining him on a trip to Mexico before finding a travel partner in Chandler Hale. Redating his presidential address “December 12” and identifying his whereabouts as “GUADA’-C-JARA,” Adams extricated himself cleanly from the secretary’s “trap,” delivering but not reading his paper. The bête noire knew when he was beaten. “We ought never,” he complained to AHA treasurer Clarence Bowen, “have elected Henry Adams president.”7
Henry’s address, “The Tendency of History,” opened with an ironic apology that slyly scored his colleagues for making him the object of their dubious tribute: “At the moment I am believed to be somewhere beyond the Isthmus of Panama. Perhaps this absence runs in some of the mysterious ways of nature’s law, for you will not forget that when you did me the honor to make me your president I was still farther away—in Tahiti or Fiji, I believe—and never even had an opportunity to thank you.” Subtle jibes aside, he then moved on to the topic of his talk, noting that ever since Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) historians had worked furiously to modernize their profession by constructing a “science of history.” Producing dissertation after dissertation, monograph after monograph, the historical community sought to slip the grip of the gentleman scholar by creating a rigorous peer review process dominated by academics trained in the latest techniques and practices. This in itself he thought fine. Both Henry and his brother Brooks were, by degrees, committed to the use of statistics and scientific models in their own works. But whereas many Ph.Ds. predicted an upward evolutionary ascent for society, the pessimistic Adamses believed civilizational chaos and decay equally if not more likely outcomes. In one of the address’s (several) sardonic passages, Henry a little unfairly described his fellow historians as high-minded innocents, true believers in a neat and quasi-divine scholasticism of order, organization, and arrangement: “Not one of them can have failed to feel an instant’s hope that he might find the secret which would transform these odds and ends of philosophy into one self-evident, harmonious, and complete system.”8 Yet if history had any “secrets” to share, Adams countered, might they not tell the less than edifying story of the great and divisive clashes between capital and labor, Silverites and gold-bugs, or colonizers and colonized—did not the social Darwinists posit an ongoing struggle for the survival of the fittest?
But polite society quite obviously wished to dismiss such unpleasantries, Henry observed. It tolerated historians only because they belonged to “a safe and harmless branch of inquiry.” What would happen if they posited “laws” that challenged the interests of powerful organizations or that doubted the virtues of popular democracy? Would property holders accept the idea of a “historical tendency” that claimed the errancy of property rights? Could Christians tolerate the notion that an unfathomable and perhaps amoral force determined events? Might socialism turn out to be on the right side of history after all? And if so, would the universities ignore their banker benefactors and allow their professors to preach such heresies? Tracing this argument to its logical and assuredly knotty conclusion, Adams maintained that far from offering historians the tools to better perform their duties, the still untested scientific history might make them vulnerable to public condemnation. “If,” he observed, “the new science required us to announce that the present evils of the world—its huge armaments, its vast accumulations of capital, its advancing materialism, and declining arts—were to be continued, exaggerated, over another thousand years, no one would listen to us with satisfaction.” Should that be the case, he impishly shrugged, historians would certainly be ignored, left to wander the scholastic wilderness writing for a tiny audience of “artists and socialists.”9
Henry’s “Tendency” takes obvious pleasure in predicting for the world a coming crisis. Addicted to unbridled industrialization, the major global economies, he argued, would ultimately fall into the hands of either the workers (that is, communism) or the factory owners (plutocracy); in either case, he warned his colleagues, “we must preach despair.” Above all he wished his audience to feel every oppressive ounce of its professional responsibilities—and relished telling these satisfied scholars that the price of objectivity might be higher than any of them suspected: “A science can not be played with. If an hypothesis is advanced that obviously brings into a direct sequence of cause and effect all the phenomena of human history, we must accept it, and if we accept we must teach it. The mere fact that it overthrows social organizations can not affect our attitude. The rest of society can reject or ignore, but we must follow the new light no matter where it leads.”10 These half-serious, half-spoofing remarks reflect Adams’s thoughts on the historian’s dilemma, as delivered from the temperate December climes of a distant “GUADA’-C-JARA.” He devilishly cornered his colleagues, challenging them to repudiate their distinguished if eccentric president. Should Association members take seriously his more satiric claims, he could snicker with cold satisfaction at their foolishness, and should they ignore him, he could assail their failure to recognize the bold prophet among them.
Conventional men, they ignored him.